We ought to keep energy production and manufacturing here in America, the author writes. |
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By REP. FRED UPTON | 4/15/11 4:48 AM EDT

Some in Washington insist that our nation’s environmental concerns are at odds with our economic ones. They say job protection must be sacrificed for clean air and water, or healthy economic growth cannot exist with healthy families and communities.

In fact, if our goal is to do right by the planet, we ought to keep energy production and manufacturing here in America by striking an appropriate regulatory balance. If environmental rules end up chasing jobs overseas to countries that have no clean air and water protections, the planet will suffer right along with our economy.

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POLITICO 44

Earth Day is an annual recognition that we all benefit from a clean, safe environment. It’s the perfect opportunity to dispel the myth that what’s good for our economy must be bad for our planet.

The Energy and Commerce Committee is committed to reconciling our nation’s environmental and economic goals. We created a subcommittee for that very purpose. The Environment and the Economy Subcommittee, with Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) as chairman, is scrutinizing the economic and environmental consequences of regulations in a way that neither Congress nor the administration has ever done.

This review is important because it sets the stage for sensible energy and environmental policy. We need to understand the consequences of current rules and regulations to maintain what’s working, eliminate what’s not and strengthen protections where gaps exist.

Earlier this year, House Republicans launched the American Energy Initiative, to pave the way for common-sense energy reform. The truth is, Americans want Washington to get out of the way so we can produce more U.S. energy, lower gas prices and help small business begin hiring again.

We can do that with three sensible goals: stopping government policies that are driving up energy prices, expanding U.S. energy production to lower costs and create more jobs, and promoting an “all of the above” strategy to increase all forms of U.S. energy.

In the past, energy and environmental legislation has been passed in omnibus form — massive pieces of legislation that attempt to solve every problem or address every issue in one fell swoop. The strategy was not limited to one party. But it culminated in the complex and controversial cap-and-trade legislation, which squeaked through the House and failed in the Senate.

The lesson from that legislation — and other similarly massive proposals — is that bigger is not always better. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) let it be known that the days of 2,000-page bills are over.

The American people, the legislative process and a lot of trees will benefit because of it.

An incremental approach to energy reform allows Congress to thoughtfully and constructively examine all the nuances of the policy discussion. Comprehensive legislation, in contrast, lends itself to opaque political trade-offs that don’t always make for sound public policy.

Congress could eliminate the uncertainty and red tape that have delayed oil production off the outer continental shelf in Alaska by five years. This could — with other production in the Alaska OCS — bring online an additional 1 million barrels per day of U.S. oil.

Separately, we could free up the long-stalled approval process for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring an additional 700,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada.

Eliminating these bureaucratic barriers does not require thousands of pages of legislative text. It simply requires that Congress acknowledge that these problems can be solved individually.

Each of these policies is rooted in the understanding that abundant, affordable energy will help our economy grow and thrive. It is also based on our belief that we can achieve economic growth in a way that protects our environment.

One major objection to recent environmental regulations is that they produce economic pain with no environmental gain.

For example, we heard testimony earlier this year that stringent reporting regulations for ink recycling end up treating some retail printing facilities as if they were large chemical manufacturers. Because the burden of compliance can outweigh the economic benefit, environmental rules have the perverse effect of discouraging recycling for these facilities.

This Earth Day, let’s celebrate the fact that a strong economy and responsible environmental standards support each other. If we neglect one, we could risk losing the other.

Readers' Comments (14)

Protecting water as a resource is insuring our life. Water equals our life. I would like to suggest a documentary "Water Planet" which talks about the same issue. Watch the documentary online please visit:http://www.cultureunplugged.co... />

Funny.....these are exactly the goals of the Koch Bros and every other corporate polluter. "Too much ,regulation" without stating which regulations are bothering them. Ol' Fred here, is just mouthing the words his political contributors have written for him, all code for "we want to pollute to make more money".....This is the attack used by Phil Gramm to eliminate regulations like Glass/Steagull Act, and the next thing we know, Wall Street is peddling bad mortgages as "A" rated securities. Let's let Fred go be a lobbyist and get him and his ilk out of governance....they don't do it well anyway

Ironically Upton has 0% environmental voting record for 2010 as scored by the League of Conservation voters. Shimkus, my bozo of a rep, has a 10% score. Neither of these idiots should be involved in decisions about energy choices or environmental regulations, let alone associating their names with Earth day.

The CFMA, enacted into law by President William Jefferson Clinton AND THE GOLDMAN SACHS TREASURY SECATARIE SIGNED ONTO THE PROPOSAL.

FOR CURRENT HISTORY LIBERAL CARL LEVIN SENT DOCUMENTS TO THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT THIS WEEK STATING GOLDMAN SACHS WHO WAS THE LARGEST OBAMA DONOR IN 2008 SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED BY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT FOR FRAUD COMMITTED BY GOLDMAN LEADING INTO THE MARKET CRASH!!

We could drill every last drop of oil on American land and sea and it would increase the world supply by just 2% while America consumes 25% of the world's oil. That won't do anything to lower gas prices.

You are touting increased oil drilling in Alaska and opening the Keystone XL Pipeline that would increase supply by 1.7 million barrels per day in total. Too bad that would only make a small dent since Americans consume 20 million barrels of oil per day.

The only real way to reduce gas prices is to reduce consumption of fossil fuels. That means providing alternative forms of clean energy and improving energy efficiency, no matter how much your Koch Industries benefactors try to block it.

A top official of the United Steelworkers union, International Vice President Jon Geenen, has discovered an inconvenient truth about the whole boycott campaign.

Seems the Kochs run one of the most heavily unionized operations in the country, providing some of “the best-paid manufacturing jobs in America.”

Which means that any negative impact said boycott might have on Georgia Pacific (which makes consumer goods like facial tissue, napkins, paper towels, etc.) could “make union workers collateral damage” and “the first casualties of a boycott.”

There are 4 existing forms of energy that can measurably clean the air; water power, geothermal, nuclear and natural gas.

The greens are against water power and seek to eliminate as many dams as possible. Geothermal is limited by locations available. The same groups that claim to want green energy fight tooth and nail against nuclear and natural gas.

It is impossible to believe that these people simultaneously believe that the earth is in peril from pollution and from carbon dioxide in the air and are unswervingly against anything that can reduce the problem they say exists. Their policies of biofuel, wind and solar; kill jobs, prevent technologies that can clean the air and make all energy more expensive imposing the worst possible hardships and expense on the people who can least afford it.

The restrictions on domestic energy increases cost, impacts negatively on the economy by raising the cost of everything and endangers our security by forcing relience on imported energy.

We could drill every last drop of oil on American land and sea and it would increase the world supply by just 2% while America consumes 25% of the world's oil.

Hmmmm. The EIA / DOE states that the US produces 5.31 million barrels of oil a day today, against the world's production of 72.26 million barrels a day total. This means the US produces 7.3% of total oil production today. The Rand Corp. in a 2005 report fro the DOE stated that there was at least 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Green River shale alone.

Saudi Arabia has 260 billion barrels of known reserves.

The 2% number is often repeated (twice, I have heard the president say it), but it has no basis in fact. It seems to be something cooked up on liberal blogs. It is simply not true.

Care to explain how mercury emissions from cement factories help our economy or the environment? After all, you voted to keep the EPA from regulating those emissions, along with arsenic, lead, and a host of other toxins.

Gimme a break, mate. As I've recently written in the Kalamazoo Gazette and on my own blog, your rhetoric simply doesn't match your actions.

I am an American Patriot and a 26+ year Petroleum Exploration Geologist. Below is some very interesting information from our own government, the U.S. Dept. of Energy, (DOE) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory, explaining just how much domestic petroleum reserves we in the U.S. actually have, and why we could become the "21st Century OPEC" of the world if we were only allowed to drill here in the U.S. and offshore. see below

Roughly, 99 percent of the U.S. endowment of solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels requires technical advances and/or further exploration to be economically recoverable (see figure 1a). However, the estimated sum of these resources totals approximately 51 trillion barrels of oil equivalent—43 times greater than the current estimate of the world‘s proved oil reserves. If only 2–3 percent can be recovered economically, the United States will secure additional energy reserves equal to the current estimate of the entire world‘s proved oil reserves. This supply would endure for more than 180 years at the current rate of U.S. oil consumption (.025x51trillion/7bnb/yr).

In the ?High (Oil) Price Case,? with 2030 oil price reaching roughly $100 per barrel in 2005 dollars, EIA projects that nearly 50 percent of the Nation‘s liquid fuel energy supplies will continue to be met by imports. Given present geopolitics, concern must be raised about the 10 ability of the United States to reliably and sustainably meet rising energy demands based on such a high level of imports. The EIA is constrained in the AEO to forecasting alternatives that are currently technically or economically viable. Thus, AEO omits such potential domestic alternatives as methane hydrates and U.S. oil sands and projects negligible energy contributions from EOR tied to CO2 sequestration. These resources, however, promise to create a new long-term energy security paradigm for the United States, even if only one or two begin to contribute economically in meeting U.S. liquid fuel demand. Simultaneously pursuing multiple energy alternatives allows less aggressive production targets for individual alternatives while still achieving a significant overall reduction in imports.

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HOPE this helps give truth to the debate about our energy future in America...